Iran’s Khamenei ‘will be held accountable’ over hospital strike: Israeli minister

Update Iran’s Khamenei ‘will be held accountable’ over hospital strike: Israeli minister
Smokes raises from a building of the Soroka hospital complex after it was hit by a missile fired from Iran in Be’er Sheva, Israel on June 19, 2025. (AP)
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Updated 19 June 2025
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Iran’s Khamenei ‘will be held accountable’ over hospital strike: Israeli minister

Iran’s Khamenei ‘will be held accountable’ over hospital strike: Israeli minister
  • ‘A direct hit has been reported at Soroka Hospital in Beersheba, southern Israel’
  • Iranian media reported a new barrage of missiles as rivals trade fire for a seventh day

TEL AVIV: Israel’s defense minister said Thursday that Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be “held accountable” after an Iranian strike on a hospital in Israel, adding he had ordered the army to “intensify strikes” on the Islamic republic.

“These are some of the most serious war crimes – and Khamenei will be held accountable for his actions,” Israel Katz said, adding that he and the prime minister ordered the military “to intensify strikes against strategic targets in Iran and against the power infrastructure in Tehran, in order to eliminate the threats to the state of Israel and to shake the Ayatollahs’ regime”.

An Iranian missile slammed into the main hospital in southern Israel early Thursday, wounding people and causing “extensive damage,” according to the medical facility. Israeli media aired footage of blown-out windows and heavy black smoke.

Another missile hit a high-rise building and several other residential buildings in at least two sites near Tel Aviv. At least 40 people were wounded in the attacks, according to Israel’s Magen David Adom rescue service.

Israel, meanwhile, carried out strikes on Iran’s Arak heavy water reactor, in its latest attack on the country’s sprawling nuclear program, on the seventh day of a conflict that began with a surprise wave of Israeli airstrikes targeting military sites, senior officers and nuclear scientists.

Missile hits main hospital in southern Israel

Iran has fired hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel, though most have been shot down by Israel’s multi-tiered air defenses, which detect incoming fire and shoot down missiles heading toward population centers and critical infrastructure. Israeli officials acknowledge it is imperfect.

The missile hit the Soroka Medical Center, which has over 1,000 beds and provides services to the approximately 1 million residents of Israel’s south.

A hospital statement said several parts of the medical center were damaged and that the emergency room was treating several minor injuries. The hospital was closed to all new patients except for life-threatening cases. It was not immediately clear how many were wounded in the strike.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the attack and vowed a response, saying: “We will exact the full price from the tyrants in Tehran.”

Many hospitals in Israel activated emergency plans in the past week, converting underground parking to hospital floors and move patients underground, especially those who are on ventilators or are difficult to move quickly.

‘No radiation danger’ after strike on reactor

Israel’s military said its fighter jets targeted the Arak facility and its reactor core seal to halt it from being used to produce plutonium.

“The strike targeted the component intended for plutonium production, in order to prevent the reactor from being restored and used for nuclear weapons development,” the military said. Israel separately claimed to have struck another site around Natanz it described as being related to Iran’s nuclear program.

Iranian state TV said there was “no radiation danger whatsoever” from the attack on the Arak site. An Iranian state television reporter, speaking live in the nearby town of Khondab, said the facility had been evacuated and there was no damage to civilian areas around the reactor.

Israel had warned earlier Thursday morning it would attack the facility and urged the public to flee the area.

Iran has long maintained its program is for peaceful purposes. However, it also enriches uranium up to 60 percent, a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90 percent. Iran is the only non-nuclear-weapon state to enrich at that level.

Israel is the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East but does not acknowledge having such weapons.

The strikes came a day after Iran’s supreme leader rejected US calls for surrender and warned that any military involvement by the Americans would cause “irreparable damage to them.” Israel had lifted some restrictions on daily life Wednesday, suggesting the missile threat from Iran on its territory was easing.

Already, Israel’s campaign has targeted Iran’s enrichment site at Natanz, centrifuge workshops around Tehran and a nuclear site in Isfahan. Its strikes have also killed top generals and nuclear scientists.

A Washington-based Iranian human rights group said at least 639 people, including 263 civilians, have been killed in Iran and more than 1,300 wounded. In retaliation, Iran has fired some 400 missiles and hundreds of drones, killing at least 24 people in Israel and wounding hundreds.

Arak had been redesigned to address nuclear concerns

The Arak heavy water reactor is 250 kilometers (155 miles) southwest of Tehran.

Heavy water helps cool nuclear reactors, but it produces plutonium as a byproduct that can potentially be used in nuclear weapons. That would provide Iran another path to the bomb beyond enriched uranium, should it choose to pursue the weapon.

Iran had agreed under its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers to redesign the facility to relieve proliferation concerns.

The reactor became a point of contention after President Donald Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal in 2018. Ali Akbar Salehi, a high-ranking nuclear official in Iran, said in 2019 that Tehran bought extra parts to replace a portion of the reactor that it had poured concrete into to render it unusable under the deal.

Israel, in conducting its strike, signaled it remained concerned the facility could be used to produce plutonium again one day.

“The strike targeted the component intended for plutonium production, in order to prevent the reactor from being restored and used for nuclear weapons development,” the Israeli military said in a statement.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, has been urging Israel not to strike Iranian nuclear sites. IAEA inspectors reportedly last visited Arak on May 14.

Due to restrictions Iran imposed on inspectors, the IAEA has said it lost “continuity of knowledge” about Iran’s heavy water production — meaning it could not absolutely verify Tehran’s production and stockpile.

As part of negotiations around the 2015 deal, Iran agreed to sell off its heavy water to the West to remain in compliance with the accord’s terms. Even the US purchased some 32 tons of heavy water for over $8 million in one deal. That was one issue that drew criticism from opponents to the deal.


Child labourers among 19 dead in Egypt road accident: state media

Child labourers among 19 dead in Egypt road accident: state media
Updated 55 min 12 sec ago
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Child labourers among 19 dead in Egypt road accident: state media

Child labourers among 19 dead in Egypt road accident: state media
  • Most of the victims were teenage girls working as day laborers

CAIRO: A road accident in northern Egypt killed 19 people on Friday, most of them teenage girls working as day laborers, state media reported.
A truck collided with the minibus carrying the laborers to their place of work from their home village of Kafr Al-Sanabsa in the Nile Delta, some 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of Cairo, state-owned newspaper Akhbar Al-Youm reported.
According to a list of the names and ages of the dead published by another state-owned daily, Al-Ahram, most of the workers were teenagers — two of them just 14.
Egyptian media dubbed the girls “martyrs for their daily bread.”
Road accidents are common in Egypt, where traffic rules are unevenly enforced and many roads are in poor repair.
Accidents often involve underage laborers traveling to work in overcrowded minibuses in rural areas.
At least 1.3 million minors are engaged in some form of child labor in Egypt, according to official figures.


UN peacekeeping chief ‘very, very worried’ about future of Lebanon-Israel ceasefire deal if UNIFIL withdraws

UN peacekeeping chief ‘very, very worried’ about future of Lebanon-Israel ceasefire deal if UNIFIL withdraws
Updated 52 min 2 sec ago
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UN peacekeeping chief ‘very, very worried’ about future of Lebanon-Israel ceasefire deal if UNIFIL withdraws

UN peacekeeping chief ‘very, very worried’ about future of Lebanon-Israel ceasefire deal if UNIFIL withdraws
  • Jean Pierre Lacroix tells Arab News Resolution 1701, governing peace between the nations, would be at risk if the UN Interim Force in Lebanon was no longer deployed
  • Lebanese authorities back UNIFIL and want its mandate extended, but the mission faces financial pressures and the Security Council will review it in August

NEW YORK CITY: The future of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which governs the ceasefire and peacekeeping framework between Lebanon and Israel, would be at risk without the continuing presence of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon, the UN’s top peacekeeper warned on Thursday.

Jean Pierre Lacroix, the organization’s head of peacekeeping operations, expressed his deep concern during a press conference following visits to Lebanon and Syria. He told Arab News he would be “very, very worried” about the future of the resolution if UNIFIL was withdrawn.

“UNIFIL is not an end in itself, and UNIFIL is not something standalone,” he said. “It’s a tool for supporting implementation of Resolution 1701, so the two are inextricably linked.

“I would be very, very worried about the future of Resolution 1701 if there is no UNIFIL on the ground to support the implementation of that resolution.”

UNIFIL, established in 2006 to monitor the ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel and prevent hostilities in Lebanon’s volatile southern border region, continues to play a crucial role in providing support for the Lebanese army presence in areas south of the Litani River.

The peacekeepers assist in tasks such as mine clearance and rehabilitation efforts, serve as liaisons between Lebanese and Israeli forces, and help with deconfliction efforts.

Despite progress in enforcing the provisions of the resolution, Lacroix said that violations persist and more work is needed to ensure it is fully implemented.

During his trip, Lacroix met senior Lebanese officials, including President Joseph Aoun, the prime minister, the speaker of the parliament, and the commander of the Lebanese Armed Forces. All of them, he said, reiterated the critical need for UNIFIL to maintain its presence in the country, and Lebanese authorities have formally asked the Security Council to extend the mission’s mandate.

However, UNIFIL faces severe financial constraints. Lacroix said contingency planning is underway amid liquidity shortfalls and uncertainties about the funding commitments of UN member states, particularly in light of potential US opposition to extension of the mandate.

“To the best of my knowledge, there is no final position expressed by Israel or the United States,” he said in response to reports of possible opposition to the continued deployment of UNIFIL. “But we expect consistency from member states; they give mandates and then are expected to pay on time and in full.”

Lacroix stressed that in the absence of UNIFIL, practical and symbolic support for Resolution 1701 would erode, potentially escalating tensions in a region where stability remains fragile.

“The interlocutors in Lebanon were concerned and expressed the need for UNIFIL’s presence to help mitigate and reduce tensions that remain quite high in the region,” he said.

The Security Council is scheduled to review UNIFIL’s mandate in August. The mission currently comprises about 10,000 troops from more than 40 countries.


62 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces, say Gaza rescuers

Palestinians inspect the site of an Israeli air strike on a house in Gaza City, June 27, 2025. (REUTERS)
Palestinians inspect the site of an Israeli air strike on a house in Gaza City, June 27, 2025. (REUTERS)
Updated 27 June 2025
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62 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces, say Gaza rescuers

Palestinians inspect the site of an Israeli air strike on a house in Gaza City, June 27, 2025. (REUTERS)
  • Medical charity deplores ‘slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid’ amid hunger crisis

GAZA CITY: Gaza’s civil defense agency said that Israeli forces killed at least 62 people on Friday, including 10 who were waiting for aid in the war-ravaged Palestinian territory.

The reported killing of people seeking aid marks the latest in a string of deadly incidents near aid sites in Gaza, where a US- and Israeli-backed foundation has largely replaced established humanitarian organizations.
Civil defense spokesman Mahmoud Bassal said that 62 Palestinians had been killed on Friday by Israeli strikes or fire across the Palestinian territory.
When asked for comment, the Israeli military said it was looking into the incidents, and denied its troops fired in one of the locations in central Gaza where rescuers said one aid seeker was killed.

People are being killed simply trying to feed themselves and their families. The search for food must never be a death sentence.

Antonio Guterres, UN secretary-general

Bassal said that six people were killed in southern Gaza near one of the distribution sites operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, and one more in a separate incident in the center of the territory, where the army denied shooting “at all.”
Another three people were killed by a strike while waiting for aid southwest of Gaza City, Bassal said.
The Health Ministry in the territory says that since late May, more than 500 people have been killed near aid centers while seeking scarce supplies.
GHF has denied that fatal shootings have occurred in the immediate vicinity of its aid points.
Medical charity Doctors Without Borders, or MSF on Friday slammed the GHF relief effort, calling it “slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid.”
It noted that in the week of June 8, shortly after GHF opened a distribution site in central Gaza’s Netzarim corridor, the MSF field hospital in nearby Deir Al-Balah saw a 190 percent increase in bullet wound cases compared to the previous week.
Aitor Zabalgogeaskoa, MSF emergency coordinator in Gaza, said in a statement that, under how the distribution centers currently operate: “If people arrive early and approach the checkpoints, they get shot.”
“If they arrive on time, but there is an overflow and they jump over the mounds and the wires, they get shot.”
“If they arrive late, they shouldn’t be there because it is an ‘evacuated zone’, they get shot,” he added.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that the US-backed aid operation in Gaza is “inherently unsafe,” giving a blunt assessment: “It is killing people.”
He also said UN-led humanitarian efforts are being “strangled,” aid workers themselves are starving and Israel — as the occupying power — is required to agree to and facilitate aid deliveries into and throughout the Palestinian enclave.
“People are being killed simply trying to feed themselves and their families. The search for food must never be a death sentence,” Guterres said.
Meanwhile, Bassal said that 10 people were killed in five separate Israeli strikes near the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, east of which he said “continuous Israeli artillery shelling” was reported on Friday.
Hamas’s armed wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, said they shelled an Israeli vehicle east of Khan Younis on Friday.
The Al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, said they had attacked a group of Israeli soldiers north of Khan Younis in coordination with the Al-Qassam Brigades.
Bassal added that 30 people were killed in six separate strikes in northern Gaza on Friday, including a fisherman who was targeted “by Israeli warships.”
He specified that eight of them were killed “after an Israeli airstrike hit Osama Bin Zaid School, which was housing displaced people” in northern Gaza.
In central Gaza’s Al-Bureij refugee camp, 12 people were killed in two separate Israeli strikes, Bassal said.
The 50th medic from the Palestine Red Crescent has been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, the PRCS said on Friday in a statement.
Haitham Bassam Abu Issa, a nurse at the PRCS clinic in Deir Al-Balah in the center of the Gaza strip, was killed while off duty on Thursday, the PRCS said.
“This brings the total number of PRCS staff and volunteers killed during the conflict to 50 – a deeply shocking figure,” the PRCS said.
Israeli restrictions on media in the Gaza Strip and difficulties in accessing some areas mean AFP is unable to independently verify the tolls and details provided by rescuers and witnesses.
Israel’s military said it was continuing its operations in Gaza on Friday, after army chief Eyal Zamir announced earlier in the week that the focus would again shift to the territory.
The Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that sparked the Gaza war resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed at least 56,331 people, mostly civilians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The UN considers its figures reliable.

 


UN commission says Syria must end violence against Alawites and protect places of worship

UN commission says Syria must end violence against Alawites and protect places of worship
Updated 27 June 2025
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UN commission says Syria must end violence against Alawites and protect places of worship

UN commission says Syria must end violence against Alawites and protect places of worship
  • “Disturbingly, reports continue to circulate of ongoing killings and arbitrary arrests of members of the Alawite community,” Pinheiro said
  • Pinheiro’s commission also “documented abductions by unknown individuals of at least six Alawite women”

BEIRUT: The head of a UN investigative commission on Friday called commitments made by the new authorities in Syria to protect the rights of minorities “encouraging” but said attacks have continued on members of the Alawite sect in the months since a major outbreak of sectarian violence on Syria’s coast.

Paulo Pinheiro, the head of the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria, told a meeting of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva that the current Syrian government — led by Islamist former insurgents who ousted former Syrian President Bashar Assad — had given his team “unfettered access” to the coast and to witnesses of the violence and victims’ families.

“Disturbingly, reports continue to circulate of ongoing killings and arbitrary arrests of members of the Alawite community, as well as the confiscation of the property of those who fled the March violence,” he said.

Pinheiro’s commission also “documented abductions by unknown individuals of at least six Alawite women this spring in several Syrian governorates,” two of whom remain missing, and has received “credible reports of more abductions,” he said.

Pinheiro also called on authorities to put in place more protections for places of worship after Sunday’s suicide bombing attack on a church outside of Damascus. The attack, which killed at least 25 people and wounded dozens more, was the first of its kind to take place in the Syrian capital in years.

The Syrian government has said that the perpetrators belonged to a cell of the Daesh group and that they thwarted a subsequent attempt to target a Shiite shrine in the Sayyida Zeinab suburb in Damascus.

“Attacks on places of worship are outrageous and unacceptable,” Pinheiro said. “The authorities must ensure the protection of places of worship and threatened communities and ensure that perpetrators and enablers are held accountable.”

Assad was deposed in a lightning rebel offensive in December, bringing an end to a nearly 14-year civil war.

In March, hundreds of civilians, most of them from the Alawite minority to which Assad belongs, were killed in revenge attacks after clashes broke out between pro-Assad armed groups and the new government security forces on the Syrian coast.

Pinheiro said his commission had documented scattered “revenge attacks” that happened before that, including killings in several villages in Hama and Homs provinces in late January in which men who had handed over their weapons under a “settlement” process set up for former soldiers and members of security forces under Assad, believing that they would be granted an amnesty in exchange for disarmament, were then “ill-treated and executed.”

He praised the interim government’s formation of a body tasked with investigating the attacks on the coast and said government officials had told his team that “dozens of alleged perpetrators” were arrested.

Pinheiro said the government needs to carry out a “reform and vetting program” as it integrates a patchwork of former rebel factions into a new army and security services and enact “concrete policies to put an end to Syria’s entrenched cycles of violence and revenge, in a context where heightened tensions and sectarian divisions have been reignited.”


13 killed including 3 children in Sudan paramilitary strikes in Darfur

13 killed including 3 children in Sudan paramilitary strikes in Darfur
Updated 27 June 2025
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13 killed including 3 children in Sudan paramilitary strikes in Darfur

13 killed including 3 children in Sudan paramilitary strikes in Darfur
  • Rapid Support Forces accused of shelling city of El-Fasher
  • UN seeking to secure humanitarian pause in the city

KHARTOUM: Paramilitary shelling of the besieged Darfur city of El-Fasher in western Sudan killed 13 people including 3 children on Friday, a medical source told AFP as the United Nations announced it was seeking to secure a humanitarian pause in the city.
“Another 21 people were injured due to the artillery shelling from the Rapid Support militia,” the source said, referring to the Rapid Support Forces, at war with the regular army since April 2023.
The RSF has besieged the North Darfur state capital since May of last year and has launched repeated attacks in an attempt to seize the city of an estimated million people.
The strike came hours after Sudan’s ruling Transitional Sovereignty Council said army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan’s office had agreed in a phone call with UN chief Antonio Guterres to a “week-long humanitarian truce in El-Fasher to support UN efforts and facilitate aid access to thousands of besieged civilians.”
Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Friday said “we are making contacts with both sides with that objective.”
The UN has repeatedly warned of the plight of trapped civilians in the city, where hunger has pushed families to survive on eating leaves and peanut shells as nearly no aid is allowed in.
Civilians report soaring prices and a near-total absence of health facilities, nearly all of which have been forced shut by the fighting.
A World Food Programme facility inside El-Fasher was damaged from repeated RSF shelling last month, and in early June five aid workers were killed in an attack on a UN convoy seeking to supply the city.
The paramilitary has repeatedly attacked the city and its surrounding famine-hit displacement camps, killing hundreds of civilians and pushing hundreds of thousands of already displaced people to flee.
UNICEF has described the situation as “hell on earth” for at least 825,000 children trapped in and around El-Fasher.
The RSF conquered nearly all of the vast western region of Darfur in the early months of the war, but has been unable to seize North Darfur state capital El-Fasher despite besieging the city for over a year.
An RSF source told AFP Friday the paramilitary had not received a ceasefire proposal.
Aid sources say an official famine declaration is impossible given the lack of access to data, but mass starvation has already taken hold of the city.
Over a million people are on the brink of famine in North Darfur, according to the latest available UN figures.
Of the 10 million people currently internally displaced in Sudan — the world’s largest displacement crisis — nearly 20 percent are in North Darfur.